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movie reviews

TV Review: Lily Allen & Friends – BBC 3, 12/2

by hecklerspray staff

“I don’t know what’s sicker, animals having sex or you clapping.”

Only Lily Allen and her friends at the BBC could command such an exclamation from Cuba Gooding Jr. Her tasteless attempt at a new chat show can be best described as Heat magazine crossbred with a little Graham Norton-esque audience participation. It was actually painful to sit through Allen’s new vehicle, paper-cut painful.

The interaction with her audience seemed to be nothing more than a passing sentiment. A number of awkward exchanges with the Romford-fashion crowd ensued. Those lucky enough to have been picked out were rewarded with a place at the TFI Friday-style bar to be seldom seen again. The purpose of the bar escapes us, though it probably escapes the producers beyond its function as a holding pen for the banal.

“I don't know what's sicker, animals having sex or you clapping.” Only Lily Allen and her friends at the BBC could command such an exclamation from Cuba Gooding Jr. Her tasteless attempt at a new chat show can be best described as Heat magazine crossbred with a little Graham Norton-esque audience participation. It was actually painful to sit through Allen’s new vehicle, paper-cut painful. The interaction with her audience seemed to be nothing more than a passing sentiment. A number of awkward exchanges with the Romford-fashion crowd ensued. Those lucky enough to have been picked out were rewarded with a place at the TFI Friday-style bar to be seldom seen again. The purpose of the bar escapes us, though it probably escapes the producers beyond its function as a holding pen for the banal.
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Hecklergigs: The Duke Spirit @ Ginglik, 31/1

by hecklerspray staff

London’s public toilets have long provided ageing single men with a source of entertainment, and Ginglik, a converted ex-loo underneath the sharp end of Shepherd’s Bush Green, is keeping this fine tradition well and truly alive.

The Duke Spirit are playing here tonight, and this rather excellent little venue is inexplicably full to the rafters of greying rockers, nervously sipping their beer as sweaty young support punks Dead Kids leave the stage and push past them.

Far from being the onlookers at a gig by a band returning with only their second album, it feels like being magically transported to row A at an Oasis stadium-stuffer, but the presence of these obvious rock aficionados does attest to the underground popularity of the band’s first album, Cuts Across The Land.

London’s public toilets have long provided ageing single men with a source of entertainment, and Ginglik, a converted ex-loo underneath the sharp end of Shepherd’s Bush Green, is keeping this fine tradition well and truly alive. The Duke Spirit are playing here tonight, and this rather excellent little venue is inexplicably full to the rafters of greying rockers, nervously sipping their beer as sweaty young support punks Dead Kids leave the stage and push past them. Far from being the onlookers at a gig by a band returning with only their second album, it feels like being magically transported to row A at an Oasis stadium-stuffer, but the presence of these obvious rock aficionados does attest to the underground popularity of the band’s first album, Cuts Across The Land.
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TV REVIEW – Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles

by Stuart Heritage

Sarah is back – wife beater and all.

The Sarah Connor Chronicles could be a disaster, and not just because the title is really hard to say out loud. It’s from the creators of Terminator 3: The Rise of Machines, which is not exactly a selling point. The show is also trying to tap into a much loved sequel; it’s sci-fi, and with sci-fi there are always die-hard fans who rightly or wrongly are invariably hard to please.

The role of Sarah Connor is also a very big and muscly one to fill – Linda Hamilton owned that character, you believed she could open up a can of whoop-ass at any moment. She said things like “I’ll pump him full of this shit; I swear!” and you believed her. So can a series chronicling her life be any good, especially without the likes of Hamilton and Schwarzenegger?

Sarah is back – wife beater and all. The Sarah Connor Chronicles could be a disaster, and not just because the title is really hard to say out loud. It’s from the creators of Terminator 3: The Rise of Machines, which is not exactly a selling point. The show is also trying to tap into a much loved sequel; it's sci-fi, and with sci-fi there are always die-hard fans who rightly or wrongly are invariably hard to please. The role of Sarah Connor is also a very big and muscly one to fill – Linda Hamilton owned that character, you believed she could open up a can of whoop-ass at any moment. She said things like “I'll pump him full of this shit; I swear!” and you believed her. So can a series chronicling her life be any good, especially without the likes of Hamilton and Schwarzenegger?
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TV Review: A Shot Of Love With Tila Tequila

by Matthew Laidlow

Have you ever watched TV and had that slight feeling of déjà vu? It tends to happen a lot on quiz shows. Be it from the same old sob story about why people need money or the dire way creators come up with a new show.

It now appears that MTV has an equally strong mission to turn its viewer’s brains in to mush. And it does this by making one show and then remaking the balls off it in a billion exact same ways. So we had another ‘new’ programme debuted on our screens last night. We were introduced to MTV’s latest offering, A Shot Of Love With Tila Tequila.

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MOVIE REVIEW: No Country for Old Men

by hecklerspray staff

The history of cinema has given us many a bad haircut over the years.

Cameron Diaz in Being John Malkovich, Tom Hanks in The Da Vinci Code and Nicholas Cage in pretty much everything since the turn of the millennium. Never before though has someone with such a bad haircut been so terrifying and menacing than Chigurh, played by Javier Bardem in No Country for Old Men.

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MOVIE REVIEW: Charlie Wilson’s War

by hecklerspray staff

War! What is it good for? Absolutely nothing! Except produce an entertaining true life account of how one man managed to find time in between drinking and having sex with Julia Roberts to change one.

Charlie Wilson’s War is set back in the 1980s during the conflict between Afghanistan and the Soviet Union, in which US Congressman Charlie Wilson (Tom Hanks) decided to intervene and help the Afghan freedom fighters win the war with the help of CIA ‘tached wonder Gust Avrakotos (Philip Seymour Hoffman).

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TV Review: Doctor Who – Voyage of the Damned, Christmas Special

by hecklerspray staff

It was once said that everybody is doing a brand new dance now, and that we should perform said dance, known as the locomotion. It was Kylie Minogue who made that statement, and it just so happens that she also starred in this year’s epic Doctor Who special as a delightfully downtrodden waitress.

The fact that ‘downtrodden’ almost rhymes with ‘wooden’ isn’t just a coincidence; Kylie’s performance was lacking in parts, but fortunately that didn’t detract from the overall enjoyment. The special was set on board the spaceship Titanic and, you guessed it, something went wrong.

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MOVIE REVIEW: I Am Legend

by David Schwartz

Imagine a world populated only by Will Smith, his dog and a host of blood-sucking Gillian McKeith lookalikes. Oh and it’s all Emma Thompson’s fault!

That is the nightmarish vision set out in I Am Legend, directed by Francis Lawrence (Constantine). Part sci-fi horror, part art-house stroll, the film is based on Richard Matheson’s post-apocalyptic 1954 book about the last man alive on earth.

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TV REVIEW: Bear Grylls: Born Survivor, Discovery Channel

by David Schwartz

Forget crocodiles, sharks, or insects that make you bleed through your arse, Bear Grylls is the scariest thing on TV.

In truth, at first glance ex-Etonian Bear, or ‘Edward Michael’, as his mother likes to call him, hardly looks like the stuff of nightmares. He has an accent that would shatter glass and looks more like a well-intentioned Geography teacher than an action hero.

But anybody who has tuned into his Bear Grylls: Born Survivor series on the Discovery Channel knows exactly what we’re talking about.

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MOVIE REVIEW: Southland Tales

by hecklerspray staff

Southland Tales. As in Tales from Southern California, but a different California, where Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson is an action star turned prophet, Justin Timberlake is a veteran of Iraq, Sean-William Scott is actually a pair of twins, and Sarah Michelle-Gellar is a porn star named Krysta Now. “No-one rocks the cock like Krysta Now.” Or so we’re told. You never actually see her rocking the cock, and she is more than welcome.

But the film doesn’t try and pander to the type of audience who want to see a flash of tits. Actually, it doesn’t pander to anyone. It is by far and away the most experimental film to come out of Hollywood recently, if you discount David Lynch.

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